


The Caretaker in the Lighthouse

by AVegetarianCannibal



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fables - Freeform, Hannibal is still a cannibal, Lighthouses, M/M, Magic, Memory Loss, Monsters, Sirens, Unexplained Magic, Will still loves dogs, myths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-06 19:01:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16838527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AVegetarianCannibal/pseuds/AVegetarianCannibal
Summary: A lone man has lived in the lighthouse for a hundred years or more, his only company the occasional dog or two. One day, an oddly familiar stranger arrives on his doorstep.





	The Caretaker in the Lighthouse

Although he still looked like a young man, Will had been caretaker of the lighthouse for well over a hundred years. He’d given up counting long ago, so it was possible much more than a century had passed. He didn’t even remember his own surname.

The lighthouse, or whoever had brought it into existence, always made certain that Will had everything he needed. There was always bread in the little kitchen, and fresh cheese and apples. The fishing was plentiful off the pier some 30 feet from his door and whenever he was about to run out of fishing line, a new spool of it appeared on the table by the hearth.

For companionship, the lighthouse led a dog to his doorstep every once in a while. Sometimes, it would bring him two dogs at a time, and all he had to do was be ever vigilant for the ships that sailed dangerously close—not to the rocky shore, but to the islet where the sirens lived.

He’d saved most of the ships over the years, but not all.

In the early years, before he’d become skilled at his task, he lost more than he saved. Will would watch through his spyglass in horror as the beasts dragged the men ashore, and he would scream uselessly as they perished. The sirens had skin like black kelp, and crowns of coral growing from their bald heads, and all of them were dripping red by the time they’d finished with their meals.

One night, as the dogs slept in their beds at his feet and he kept his spyglass trained on the islet in the distance, there came a knock at the door.

Such an unfamiliar sound it was that the dogs took a moment to begin barking.

“Go away,” Will called down. “I’m receiving no visitors!”

“Please,” a man’s voice called back. “I come to plead for your help.”

There was an oddly familiar quality about the man’s voice, which tugged on some long-forgotten memory in the back of Will’s mind. He thought he could taste the cold Atlantic in back of his throat for just a moment.

He looked once more towards the islet. There were no ships approaching on the horizon; he could spare a few minutes.

When he went down and threw open the door, he was greeted by a man with not a stitch of clothes covering his gaunt body. The stranger hugged himself against the icy mist that blew in off the sea and looked up at him with imploring eyes.

“Will,” the stranger whispered, and promptly collapsed at his feet. “I swear by all the gods in the sea, I thought I’d never see you again.”

***

He made a bed for the stranger of sweet dried coastal grass and woolen blankets, and stoked the fire in the hearth until the whole room glowed like an ember. He covered the stranger’s frail body with another blanket and instructed the dogs to lie atop him for warmth.

How had he known Will? Will sat at the table beside the fire and drank whiskey from a mug. There was something familiar about the man, Will thought, that tugged at him the way his voice had. He was not as young as Will, and his long hair was silver and gold, and his face had as angular an appearance as the rocky coastline itself. He smelled of the sea and of iodine from his swim through the kelp, and his arms bled from the scraping of coral. Will couldn’t fathom how he’d missed the ship, although he supposed perhaps it might have only been a row boat, small enough to escape his vigilance. He was lucky, Will also supposed, that he had crashed closer to the lighthouse than to the islet.

After checking again for no sign of approaching ships, Will bandaged the man’s arms. Even the feel of his skin felt familiar somehow. Will could have sworn he’d held these very hands before. He prepared warm broth and held the bowl to the stranger’s lips.

“Please drink,” he said.

His visitor opened his eyes and smiled. “I’ve missed you so much, my Will.”

Will was so rattled, it was everything he would do to hold the bowl steady as the stranger drank.

“Who are you?” Will asked.

“My name is Hannibal,” the man said between sips. “I can only hope you’ll remember me.”

Will frowned. Although he was worried, he found he was not frightened. The lighthouse had only ever provided him with whatever he needed, and so perhaps it had brought this man to his doorstep once before, and done so once again.

***

The next morning, Hannibal appeared much improved. His dark amber eyes were full of life and his cheeks bore a glow of rose.

“How is it you know me?” Will asked.

“I fear if I tell you, you won’t believe me,” Hannibal said. “If you remember on your own, you may be more inclined to help me.”

“Are you alone?” Will asked.

Hannibal appeared to think about that, as if he were trying to decide how much he should reveal without disobeying his own insistence that Will remember him on his own.

“I was with a small scientific expidition,” he said slowly. “Our ship was tossed by a sudden storm, as if the sea gods had reached up their hands from the water to pull thunder from the sky. Most of us perished in minutes, others made it to one shore or another.”

Will closed his eyes. It was easy to picture the tableau as Hannibal had described it. He found himself imagining how the other men had felt as cold water filled their lungs. Another jolt of familiarity hit him and he shivered.

“I think my ship crashed here, too,” he said. "A very long time ago."

“Do you remember?” Hannibal asked. Will nodded, his eyes still closed. “Tell me what you remember. Please.”

“I…” He felt the waves sweeping his body along, tried to keep from screaming lest the water enter his lungs. Pieces of the ship buffeted him, bruising his back, cutting his skin. “Someone was holding my hand, but the sea… the sea kept coming between us.”

“Don’t let go, my love,” Hannibal said.

Will opened his eyes. “That’s precisely what he said.”

Hannibal rose from his bed and knelt at Will’s feet. He took both Will’s hands in his own. “Precisely,” he agreed.

Will sobbed. “It’s you. _It’s you._ How could I have forgotten you?”

He gathered Hannibal up his arms and kissed his odd, beautiful face, and ran his fingers through his salt-thick hair. When their mouths met, Will touched something wholly unfamiliar with the tip of his tongue: Hannibal’s sharp, sharp teeth.

He released his hold on Hannibal and backed away. His body shuddered with revulsion.

“You… you’re from the islet. This is a trick.”

Hannibal held up his hands, and made no advance towards Will. “I am from the islet, but before that I was from the same ship as you. I've said nothing but the truth.”

“You’re a siren,” Will said, barely able to keep down his bile. “Eater of men. _Cannibal_.”

“That is what you call us,” Hannibal said. “We are no longer men, but we _were_ men like you. Whoever or whatever rules the sea decided in its wisdom to send me to the islet, and you to the lighthouse.”

“Why?” Will asked. He tasted salt, and realized he was weeping. “Why would it separate us and make us enemies?”

Now Hannibal’s eyes glimmered with tears, as well. “Oh, my love, we were never meant to be enemies. If you kiss me just once more, you’ll know.”

Will couldn’t bring himself to approach this monster he’d once known, but neither could he bear to pull away when Hannibal reached out to hold his face and touch their lips together.

***

Three hundred years ago, a small ship sailed into the waters off the Atlantic coast, dropping anchor wherever seemed rife with new species of birds and fish to chronicle. Will Graham was a young science officer, with not only a keen eye for discovering new life, but for his intense passion for protecting it from those who would exploit t.

His other passion was reserved for the ship’s captain, Hannibal Lecter.

They met in the captain’s quarters as often as they could, at first to while away in one other’s company as they spoke of Will’s discoveries. Then, as the expedition went on, the meetings grew more secretive, and a bond more than academic began to form. Soft touches from finger to hand progressed to langorous caresses, brief embraces to desperate clinches that ended with tearing one another free of their clothes so they could rut against one another skin to skin.

“Wouldn’t it be ideal,” Will said one night as they lay in a drowsy tangle, “if we could stay here forever and never report back home everything we had found?”

“It might be for the best,” Hannibal agreed. “More ships will come and more after that, and they won’t care for what we’ve found. They'll ruin this place.”

The storm came then, and a great crack of lightning struck the ship. There was no time to dress again as the ship began to sink. Great winds hurled men from the deck and into the water. Most drowned at once, but others were spared.

Will was still clinging to Hannibal’s hand when a towering wave crashed over them, dragging them into the Atlantic. In the distance to the east, he could see the shadowy outline of an islet. To the west was shore. If they could swim to one or the other, they might be saved.

The sea whispered in his ear. “Do you promise to protect the islet?”

He nodded and saw Hannibal nodding, too, as if the sea had posed the same question to them both.

“Don’t let go, my love,” Hannibal said.

He gripped tighter to Hannibal’s hand, but two waves pulled them apart. No matter how hard he fought against the battering current, it pulled them farther and farther away from one another.

“Lead all ships to the islet,” the sea whispered, “and those I’ve chosen to live there will devour the unworthy men who wash ashore.”

***

Will opened his eyes and looked up at Hannibal, who gazed back at him with the same fondness he had all those centuries ago.

“I forgot,” Will whispered. “The lighthouse was never meant to keep ships _away_ from you. I… I made myself forget.”

“You watched our gruesome work in understandable horror,” Hannibal said. “My former crewmen and I, the things we became when we undertook our duty… it was not easy for you to see decade after decade.”

“You must be starving,” Will said, touching Hannibal’s gaunt face.

“I swear on the living sea, we only consume the ones who have no regard for the land I protect,” Hannibal said. “The land _you_ and I protect.”

Will took him by the hand and walked with him outside to where the water churned at the rocks. As soon as Hannibal’s bare feet touched the sea, his human countenance transformed and he became the creature Will had spied so often in disgust.

He lay his head against Hannibal’s chest and moved Hannibal’s hands to his waist to be held in return.

“Tell the others I remember now,” Will said, “but come back to me.”

“I don’t believe I can,” Hannibal said. “I nearly died swimming to you. I’m not meant to be here.”

Will pulled back and looked up at him. “I’ll forget again. I build forts in my mind against the horror. I’ll forget it’s you and what I need to do.”

“You must try,” Hannibal said.

Will nodded and knelt in the rocks, and placed his hand in the sea. It was the same living thing that had separated him from Hannibal, and provided him with food to eat and dogs to keep him company. It could provide him with one more thing.

“You will let him come to me!” he shouted towards his unseen benefactor and jailer all in one. “Once a year, you will smooth the waters and let him swim to me, and he will remind me or your islet will die!”

The tide ebbed away from his hand.

Minutes passed, and then the water came back in small, quick waves that lapped at the rocks with a sound like, “ _Yes… yes… yes_.”

Will stood up again and took Hannibal’s odd, beautiful face in his hands again. “I will see you soon, and see you again after that, and 300 more times after that.”

“At the very least,” Hannibal said, and, giving him one last kiss, dove into the Atlantic, and swam for the islet once more.

“At the very least,” Will whispered to the sea. “At the very least.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know coral doesn't grow in the cold parts of the Atlantic, but I took some liberties.
> 
> For the purposes of this story, there were no indigenous people near this part of the shore or the islet for the sea to choose as protectors.


End file.
